The dark had a pulse. Guinevere could hear it. Could feel it in her teeth, in her ribs, in the place where her wolf used to live. Maddox’s voice ca through like sound underwater, distorted and warm and too far away to grab.
She reached for it, but her fingers closed on nothing. Then the dark swallowed her again.
✦✦✦
"She needs blood and liquids. Yesterday." Aldric walked with Maddox without a word, checking Guinevere’s pulse. He’d heard bits from Sterling and Ryker, but none from Maddox yet.
Aldric didn’t sugarcoat it. "She’s crashing because she’s out of blood, not because of the dark magic." Aldric set up the draw line. "Fated mates are always a match."
Maddox rolled up his sleeve to his bicep. "You’re wasting ti explaining what I already know. Take it."
The blood helped. Her color ca back enough that a lesser healer might have called it progress. Her pulse found a rhythm that didn’t skip, and for ten minutes Maddox let himself believe the worst was over. It wasn’t. She didn’t open her eyes. Aldric ran a second bag of fluids and her body took them and gave nothing back. Her temperature climbed.
"Maddox." Aldric’s voice was careful, which was not a word anyone had ever associated with Aldric. "Her body isn’t stabilizing."
Maddox gripped the edge of the bed. His knuckles were still split from the ravine wall. He’d already watched her die once tonight, and his body had morized every second of it, and it was happening again and he could not, would not, survive the replay.
Aldric didn’t know what happened in that jungle. It was a black ops.
What he knew was that wolves had been embedded on a dragon strike team, which was unusual enough to note, and that the woman in front of him was half wolf and dying from the half he couldn’t treat.
"The wolves on that team. Are they still in Drakencrest?"
Maddox’s silence was its own answer.
"I’ll take that as a yes. If one of them is willing to give blood, it’s our best bet. Wolf blood for a wolf. That’s the math."
"Yeah. I’ll get him."
He left Aldric with Guinevere and walked the corridor with a purpose that felt like swallowing glass.
Nicholas and his n had been given quarters in the east wing ambassador suites. Maddox had forgotten about that, and it was probably for the better.
He didn’t get far. Nicholas was already coming from the opposite direction, moving fast, hand pressed to his chest.
"Her heartbeat is wrong." Nicholas stopped three feet from Maddox. "I can feel it stuttering. What’s happening?"
Fated mate blood is always a match. The thought hit him differently now, standing in this corridor, looking at a wolf who had felt Guinevere’s pulse stutter from three wings away.
Maddox had known that since the war room eting with Nicholas.
Nicholas was her fated mate. The wolf to her wolf. The other half of a woman who had always been two things at once.
Maddox had thought he’d accepted this in the war room. He’d thought he’d co to terms with it. He hadn’t. Every ti the thought rose, he’d swatted it down so fast he’d confused the reflex for resolution. But knowing and accepting were different animals, and Maddox had been feeding one while starving the other.
Because admitting Nicholas was telling the truth ant admitting that Maddox wasn’t enough for her on his own. That she needed sothing he couldn’t provide. That the wolf in her had chosen soone, and it wasn’t him. It wasn’t him. It was never going to be him. And the sooner he stopped fighting that, the sooner she might survive the night.
"Yeah. Follow ."
Maddox led Nicholas through corridors that got progressively more private, past guards who noted Nicholas’s presence and said nothing because Maddox’s face made it clear that comntary would be a career-ending decision.
He was taking a wolf Alpha to his personal quarters. To the room where Guinevere slept in his arms every night. The invasion of it burned, but Guinevere was in that room, and nothing between Maddox and Guinevere’s survival was an obstacle. It was a door to walk through.
Nicholas entered the room and his eyes went straight to her with I.V. and the shallow rise of her chest. His hand went to his own chest.
Aldric assessed Nicholas in three seconds. "Alpha blood is the absolute best. This works out well."
Neither Maddox nor Nicholas said the word fated. The truth stayed where it was. Aldric drew Nicholas’s blood, hung it, and ran the second line.
The effect was gradual but visible. Her pulse, still uneven, found a rhythm that held for more than thirty seconds at a ti.
"She’s responding," Aldric said. "But I’ll need more. Both of you."
Maddox and Nicholas rolled up their sleeves at the sa ti with the sa arm at the sa angle. "Take as much as you need."
Word for word. Simultaneously. Two kings who couldn’t agree on the color of the sky, speaking in unison over the body of the woman who had made them both into sothing they never planned to be.
Aldric blinked once. Then decided the dical mystery of two kings moving in sync was above his pay grade and below his curiosity.
When the healer left, Maddox could have told Nicholas to leave too. Should have, probably. But the wolf’s blood was in her veins and Nicholas was the most effective secondary monitor outside of himself when it ca to her.
The silence was loud in the way silence only gets between two n who would rather be anywhere else but are both exactly where they need to be.
Maddox watched the pulse in her throat like a man reading scripture. Nicholas sat in the chair on the opposite side of the bed.
Here is what no one tells you about watching soone you love die: it doesn’t matter who you are. King, Alpha, conqueror, commander. You sit in a chair. You watch an I.V. drip. And you beco the most useless version of yourself at the exact mont the person you love needs you to be the most effective.
"Kael." Nicholas broke the silence first. "He called you ’little brother’ in the jungle. More than once."
Maddox’s gold eyes stayed on Guinevere’s I.V. line. He gave nothing.
Nicholas leaned back. His gaze shifted to the ceiling, and the exhale that ca out of him carried the kind of weight that only surfaces at three in the morning.
"I have a half brother too. Younger. Different mother." Nicholas’s voice was steady. The kind of even tone that took practice. "He broke off from the family before I took the throne. Decided the Shadowfell na ca with more chains than crowns and wanted no part of either."
He was quiet for a second. "Bloodlines in wolf politics are ugly, and his mother was a woman my father never should have touched."
The silence stretched so long that Nicholas assud the conversation was dead. Received and buried. Dragons didn’t reciprocate vulnerability.
Then Maddox spoke. What ca out of his mouth was sothing he hadn’t said aloud in years. "Kael’s mother was a mistress of my father’s."
Nicholas turned his head.
"She died in childbirth. My father buried the affair and the woman in the sa month." Maddox’s jaw worked once. "Kael was raised as a firstborn son for a throne he could never take because I existed. My father made sure to remind him that he was a bastard but held him to the sa standard as an heir. That does sothing to a man."
Nicholas rolled his jaw like the words had a taste. "Succession is clean on paper. Never in practice."
"I tried to bring him back twice." Maddox leaned back in his chair and shook his head. "Before he left, Kael was a high ranking officer. I offered him the seat for High General and to be my second. He declined."
Maddox gave a dark, single laugh. "I also tried granting him lordship and land. House Ashenvale was his mother’s. Conquered before either of us were born. I saw it as a chance to correct what our father did wrong. Kael saw it as an insult that I, of all people, offered him that."
"I tried bringing my brother back too," Nicholas said after a long mont. "Kael has a blind spot to what Guinevere is because his mother was never given a title. That’s why he assus she’s a concubine."
Maddox considered it. "You’re probably right. Kael uses information to exploit weakness." He tipped his chin at Guinevere. "The less he knows about her, the better."
The quiet settled again. Different from before. The edges had worn down, the way stone smooths under running water, and what remained was two n on opposite sides of a bed, discovering that the architecture of their grief was built from the sa blueprints.
There was a knock on the door.
Maddox got up and opened it. No one was there. On the floor was a formal scroll with the Ashenvale wax seal.
Maddox let out a breath. Opened it.
Wolf Girl Concubine,
One favor. Na it. I will deliver. The price is an evening of your company, a al I select, and a conversation where you are not allowed to ntion the King for the first hour. The second hour is negotiable.
P.S. If Maddox is reading this first, and he is: Hello, little brother. Tell your concubine that I will see her very soon. Sooner than she thinks.
Maddox reread it as if his eyes were deceiving him. They weren’t.
Then the scroll burned in black fla after fifteen seconds.
"That son of a bitch."
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